The State of Print on Demand Publishing
iMage
Patrick Swenson
Muffy Morrigan
M. Todd Gallowglass
Duane Wilkins
- Even traditional publishers going to print on demand
- The Oxford Dictionary is going to POD
- POD: books never go out of print, so your backlist generate value.
- You have the ability to quickly fix errors that are found.
- Two major groups: Lightning Source (Ingrim) vs Createspace (Amazon)
- They differ in whether they charge for changes. It costs you to make changes for Lightning Source.
- ISBNs
- If you take a POD-house ISBN, the publisher shows up as Createspace.
- If you do your own ISBN, you can be the publisher.
- Each edition needs its own ISBN: e.g. mass market paperback vs. trade paperback.
- Pagecount and trim size affect cost of book
- deviant art:
- hundreds of artists
- easy way to find independent artists for doing cover art.
- (make sure you have permission for any models/buildings/etc that are visible.)
- iStockPhoto
- reasons photos and art, royalty free
- if you find an artist you like there, go to their website, because they may have other work not on iStockPhoto.
- Be aware there are commercial and private fonts: you need to make sure you have the correct rights for commercial use.
- Some cover artists do the entire cover including titles, etc, some only do the art.
- Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal. Need 3-4 month lead time for ARCs to get reviews.
- Your cover art should look good even icon sized: because most people are shopping online.
- Some small presses will still allow you to keep your e-book rights. If so, it’s a great deal, because you can sell a kindle book and keep 70%.
- Q:
- I’m self-publishing, trade paperback, and I want to keep the price under $10. So I have a pretty slim POD margin, less than my kindle version. And it’s worse even it it’s sold through a bookstore other than Amazon: then I get about 5 cents.
- Any tips on how to get the cost down, or conversely, is there a cross-over point at which it makes sense to do a limited print run to get the cost down?